A Fed Bank President's Idea Comes to Life

By

Michael S. Derby

Updated Dec. 13, 2012 11:36 p.m. ET

Wednesday was a good day for Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

For more than two years, the 54-year-old Ph.D. economist has been publicly calling on the Fed to pledge to keep credit easy until the economy reached some specific unemployment threshold so long as inflation didn't get too high.

On Wednesday, the Fed embraced his approach. It abandoned its practice of pledging to keep rates low until...